Graph API - Facebook Developers
developers.facebook.com
developers.facebook.com
Of course the cost of this is that Facebook gets your data. It's a bit of a Faustian contract (hope I'm using that reference properly). They'll save you engineering cycles and promote your content to your user's social graphs, you just have to give them your data.
Sites really now have 3 options: 1) Ignore FB to their own risk 2) Embrace FB and give up control of their data 3) Use FB as a data mirroring and distribution mechanism - but still give them all your data.
Choice 1 is a difficult decision to make... if FB becomes THE standard and you're not providing your users the experience they expect, maybe they'll go somewhere else. Of course this could be like Beacon where users hate it. Or it could be like Facebook Connect where it's cool and some sites leverage it really well, but hasn't change the landscape of the web THAT much.
If you choose Option 3 you're still giving your data to Facebook. So now you're left with, is it worth the engineering cycles to ensure you don't get locked out of your own data. I think most people on here will say yes, but a surprising number might not.
Now after thinking about it for a while, this will cause an uptick in Facebook Connect usage and integration, but I don't think it's going to fundamentally change the way sites are designed. Maybe in a year or two if Facebook continues its growth current trajectory.
And may i restate: The API is slick and sexy and feels damn open.
The only downside here is that its a company like facebook that ends up as the biggest winner. But should you as a minor site really give a damn? I mean, its unlikely that facebook is in competition with you anyway so its not like you actually lose anything by giving them data.
And isn't this really a step in the direction the entire web have been crying out for a long time? No more data duplication, "let me put my info one place and then pluck it from there". I consider todays f8 to be quite major for web developers like myself and obviously for facebook as this means they are actually heading towards their goal from some time ago; Becoming a platform.
However, one thing stands out to me: the new APIs don't expose networks or network affiliations. It seems like Facebook has been phasing these out for a while, but they could be very useful to me. Does anyone know the story here?
(This is a good thing, btw. I guess there is now doubt that Facebook got good value out of that purchase)
also looks like bret taylor's been working on this - guess the friendfeed acquisition worked well for facebook.
Seems a little redundant, but maybe I missed something.
Because RDF sucks? And microformats only help in some cases
This is their proprietary FBML markup, I believe
It looks a lot like JSON to me. What are you looking at?
If a suitable standard exists, you would think they'd take advantage of it (increased adoption), no? I also don't like the idea of duplicating efforts, but apparently I have missed some technical limitation.
[Edit] I think I just found the part of the answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283507.
Are you referring to the "RDF sucks" bit? Yes, I think it is a widely held view, which often people are too scared to express.
Here's a decent reference: http://norman.walsh.name/2004/07/30/rdfxml
(Norm Walsh is the chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group and co-chair of the XML Core Working Group, so he does have some kind of grasp of how XML is supposed to work)
N3 is much more widely liked - http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer - as is RDFa - http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/